Techstination: your destination for gadgets and gear

Techstination contains a wide assortment of reviews and
interviews. Technology correspondent Fred Fishkin talks
about the latest trends, the people behind the products
and some of the off-beat things you can find online.

Super Game Machine... From Dell

Techstination feature for Thursday, May 22, 2003

The latest super game machine isn't from Sony or Microsoft... it's from Dell. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. While the video game console machines continued to attract a lot of the attention at the E3 gaming trade show... Dell was there to show off its new Dimension XPS. It's a computer designed for hard core gamers. Product marketing VP Tim Mattox...

"I think it's more like coming home than a new niche for us in the sense that Dell always went after the high end of the market in the early days. Since we've gone into consumer we really went pretty main stream with that and this allows us to circle back to the high end of the market and address it with a product specific for that particular segment."

Prices can top three thousand dollars for models with the fastest Pentium 4 processors available a gigabyte of memory and two 120 gigabyte hard drives.
For that money you could put an Xbox in every room of your house including the garage and have some cash left over. But Mattox says the market for the loaded machines is growing...

"It's a category that's relatively small compared to the main stream computing market. If you look at overall software, game consoles, PCs, PC game software, you're talking about a multi, multi billion dollar market. Actually with the way content is going these days is actually looking close to the size of the movie industry."

Demand for the high end computers, like the consoles, can often be driven by the release of new games. And some big sequels ... such as Doom III and Half-Life 2 are due to arrive this year. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.